Given that I bought my bitcoins through an exchange linked to my bank account, no, I won't be avoiding taxes. It would be nice if the U.S. government would rule on exactly how bitcoins should be treated for tax purposes. As currency? As a normal asset capital gain? As income? Nobody really knows.

There isn't a specific rule on bitcoins because until 2013 no one had ever really made any money on them. I think the best thing to do for now is just treat it like any other capital gain, and if you get audited you can pretty plausibly say you did what seemed most logical at the time.

There are some of us who have concluded, through careful reasoning, that taxes are loot, the product of mass organized extortion, used to fund mass murders and further extortion.

So, from our perspective, if someone used Bitcoin to protect themselves from that abominable robbery, we would conclude that person is being courageous (for the risk he's taking) and virtuous (for living by sound universal principles).

Oh yeah, absolutely, a tiny portion of that stolen money they use to pay for those services. Let us also remember that none of these services was first provided by the criminals thieving your money away.

Also, your list is incomplete -- I'm sure it's just a coincidence -- as it mysteriously doesn't list the truly expensive services, the only services that only the criminals can provide, with complete and total impunity of course:

the valuable service of bombing brown people's weddings and children,

the service of inflicting pain, drugs, radiation, and disease on many, many people, against their will,

the service of cocaine, prostitutes and luxury trips for politicians,

the service of creating laws ('regulations") that enrich the rich and sabotage the poor,

the service of caging millions of nonviolent people for having the wrong vegetation,

the service of executing people's dogs and heads of household,

the service of accusing people of acts that are absolutely not wrong, and then extorting false confessions of them,

the service of recording everything you say online, and planting backdoors in your electronics,

the service of slaughtering kids, setting them ablaze alive, while claiming that they were gonna rescue them,

the service of granting monopolies to special interest groups who bribed the politicians,

the service of ruining anyone who dares to compete with those monopolies they created,

last but not least, the service of blaming you, their victim, whenever they ruin your life and the life of your family, as a punishment for giving them anything less than your full obedience, and of course all the money they demand with threats.

...and so on, and so forth. Truly, what would we do without the criminals? That is a nice house you got there, it would be sad if it went up in flames, eh?

The big deal to me is that I do have the option, in the future, to stop paying taxes on it/move to a more friendly jurisdiction before cashing out. I quite like the fact that in practice tax compliance is my decision, rather than an unavoidable matter.

Being able to avoid asset confiscations, capital controls and all the other scary stuff that a government can pretty much do on a whim is really nice. I hope never to need it, but I quite like having countermeasures.

You're only proving him right in the same way you would be proving secret weddings in medieval Ireland could be used as a weapon to deprive the local lord of his legal droit du seigneur. I fail to see the difference and truly can't grasp the people who see this as a negative.

I think taxes are theft, and I'll avoid them whenever possible(just like the rich do), but Krugman says that avoiding his crazy schemes to steal more money from me is evil. Well Krugman, I think your plans are evil. Guess we're at an impasse.

As far as Bitcoin is concerned, it's not very useful to avoid taxes, imo. If you are going to make a big purchase, the IRS will still figure it out. Now, if everyone started hiding money, maybe the IRS wouldn't have enough man-power to actually enforce it. But that's already true today, and true in many other countries. Then they'd probably have to switch to some other taxation scheme like consumption tax, because businesses are a lot fewer in number than income earners.

Krugman believes we should hire all jobless people to dig ditches, then fill them back in. I'm not going to listen to much of his advice aside from what he won his prize in(international trade I think?).

edit: On the other hand, I'm really excited to hear that he thinks Bitcoin is an immediate threat to central banking. Wow, I thought that was just /r/bitcoin's circlejerking!

Income and sales taxes are horrible and I avoid them when I can. I can't speak for other countries, but where I live, in the U.S., 90% of federal income taxes fund things which I consider bullshit. Fortunately, income and sales taxes are the easiest to avoid by using Bitcoin.

People will invariably bring up the issue of who will pay for the roads/cops/fire department/education (actually schooling which is different than education, but I digress). Guess what? Those are paid from local property taxes now. While a land value tax is better than a straight up property tax, both are at least local and track well with benefits received. They are also pretty much impossible to avoid and don't pay for "bullshit."

Sales tax in general is really hard to avoid. You're going to go to the largest companies with the most scaled infrastructure(ebay, amazon, newegg), and they're going to faithfully report their earnings or get reamed.

If you want to avoid these, you have to pay a lot more extra than just sales tax generally.

OTOH, sales tax is a lot less tyrannical than the IRS. I'd gladly trade.

Sales taxes are harder to avoid and are less bad in that there are less IRS reporter slaves, and the slaves are businesses who can better afford compliance costs. I'd trade income for sales taxes currently, but they're still not that great. The taxes are still passed on to the end consumer which violates one of Adam Smith's cannons of good taxation.

Ultimately sales taxes are still unliberatarian because they still tax one side of a voluntary transaction.

That's fine and dandy, but I'm a pragmatist anarchist. the IRS has power over every single person to throw them in jail or make life hell. The feds and states already exert plenty of power over companies. I'm ok with incremental improvement.

Slight correction. Left-anarchists and communists are anti-propertarians ONLY of convenience. Things like factories, houses, and manufacturing equipment cannot be owned, but shirts and shiny iPhones can. All distinctions they espouse are arbitrary and meaningless. The only objective observable difference is that the proponents of such ideologies have the latter, but do not possess the former, and they resent all those who do

Furth, you're wrong, the law does not say what you think. Taxes are illegal under the constitution. No legislature, which gets it's limited authority from the constitution, can pass a law that exceeds that authority, and thus all federal tax law is null and void according to the Supreme Court in Marburg v. Madison.

No, it belongs to me. The government steals it, wastes most of it, and spends a few pennies on the dollar on wasteful attempts at philanthropy so that useful idiots like you can conflate government with compassion.

Edit: Wow, downvotes. This is not some debatable point: It's property rights law.

Nope. It's a matter of taxation. It's a matter of how much the government steals from us.

It's mine when I earn it. No set of laws lets other people use it. A set of laws lets government steal it from me and give some of it to other people, but a set of laws isn't always right and law is subordinate to natural rights, like the right to property.

Then, legally speaking, that would be a fixed percentage and not whatever the government decides to steal that year.

In terms of natural rights, why is your right to property a natural right but other people's right to property not?

Other people don't have a right to my property. Why not just extend your argument? Government says you can't have a abortion? Too bad, you body isn't your property! Government says you can't marry someone of your own sex? Tough titties, it's the law!

I think what hes trying to say is that your justification for taxation is circular, like saying that God exists because the book written by God says he exists... taxation is just because the taxers say that's just.

If taxation is just, why is it only OK for one group of people (coincidentally the group that has the most guns and lethal force that they use against those who don't agree with their opinion) be given a monopoly right on taxation?

If taxation is just, why is it only OK for one group of people (coincidentally the group that has the most guns and lethal force that they use against those who don't agree with their opinion) be given a monopoly right on taxation?

Taxation is just property rights enforcement by other people. Why are some types of property rights enforcement legitimate and not others?

I have no idea what you mean by "Taxation is just property rights enforcement by other people." Could you elaborate on that? Perhaps you can provide me what a definition of taxation is and what property or property rights are.

It's an analogy. The state are the robbers. If they make the laws that say "taxation is ok" then that doesn't mean taxation is legitimate. Would you be OK with the execution of Jews in Nazi Germany? Because the law supported that.

How come when you get property as the result of the government programs called property rights and contract law, that's "natural" and "legitimate", but when other people get property as a result of other government programs, that's illegitimate and just like the holocaust?

As long as me getting mine didn't fuck you from getting yours, i dont see a problem. Other than a macro view of politics, this idea is the most commonly held belief of all mankind. Dont think so? Really? Question yourself on the most mundane of activities, do you not put your own well being above others? 99% of the time, yes, you do. You look out for yourself because you know, no one else is. If everyone were to be responsible for their own actions, perhaps poverty would be eliminated simply by people making the best decisions they can in their own life.

This includes things like: getting a good education, no matter how hard that may be; don't waste money you dont have (whether that is not being addicted to booze or ciggs, or perhaps realizing a condom costs less than a kid). Your life is your own, sure you play the cards you are delt, but any cards can win the hand. ANY.

I have always enjoyed the irony of the left. They hold nature and mother earth in the highest regard. What is poverty if not mother nature acting through a free market to very harshly provide incentive for people to take responsibility for themselves.

its no a "force of nature" like a hurricane or a volcano, but it certainly is a basic and universal human behavior to engage in markets. When I have something I you want and you have something i want, and we agree that the things we both have can be exchanged for the things we want, that is a market.

But what hand of cards you are dealt is a much bigger indicator of whether you win or not than how you play them is. Economic mobility is much higher in states with proper social safety nets.

Having safety nets results in more people being dealt more equal hands, which means that what you achieve does result from your own hard work, and not just luck in being born how you were. There's a reason most libertarians/ancaps are white, male, and relatively well off.

But when someone is bankrupted paying for leukaemia treatments, it's totally because they didn't make the right decisions in life, right? So they deserve poverty.

If you're born into abject poverty, you're not likely to get out, for many, many reasons, most of which have nothing to do with personal responsibility. And they're even less likely to get out in a 'libertarian utopia'.

For intents in purposes the US and canada both have a median income at the same value (US+1.5k), while we blow them out of the water in terms of mean income (US+10k). Both are PPP (a cost of living control) and (the second controls for taxes, before taxes its worse +12k) What does this tell you?

The mafia was doing something wrong when they extorted people. Even if they built a road to your house and a school for your children with some of the money, it would not cancel out the wrongness of how they aquired that money.

Let's say I grab 10 of my friends and go to your house. I say "let's have a vote to see if Said_No-one_Ever should give away his computer." 10 of us vote in favor and you vote against. Is that legitimate?

Actually the mafia will only kill you after you've refused to pay them. Their business model focuses on money first, and only if that's refused do they resort to violence against the people who do not acknowledge their legitimacy. So it's not as much unlike the government as you'd like to think.

elections? like they gave you any kind of power. politicians act and do whatever they want, sometimes following the influence of lobbists and activists. Only a fool could think politicians "represent the people".

Yes, I do. I don't know what kind of a world you live in if you think that every country is as corrupt as US. Where I live it's quite the opposite of US's legalized, bribery, there are strict laws on campaign funding and politicians basically can't accept valuable gifts. Last time someone was suspected of receiving a bribe, the media shitstorm lasted for months.

It's a very attractive ideology for those with a deficit of empathy. Adam Lanza comes to mind. The psuedo-scientific language used to describe people as either "consumers" or "rational actors" is also pretty dehumanizing.

True empathy is acknowledging that individuals are humans with their own unique desires and views. False empathy is using violence to shape someone's life "for their own good", aka liberal paternalism.